Piers Grove: If you don't mind, I'm going to use my own experience here as a guide. As a 46 year old male with two beautiful kids. I was woken at 6:30 AM by my daughter jumping on me in bed as they do, and I stirred. With what seemed like one heck of a hangover. I was fairly non-responsive. I could certainly move and I could think, but I certainly couldn't stand up without support and I had the classic. Face hanging down. So it was pretty obvious to my fiance that I was in the midst of a stroke and an ambulance was called and that left me with time to get dressed and I guess to first assess in isolation my symptoms. I was dribbling, I was not able to. Swallow properly. My speech was just a jumble. It was slurred. I couldn't get out pro, pro proper nouns for my kids or my partner. I could barely communicate with Paramedics who were absolutely brilliant and got me off to the hospital within 15 minutes of the call, what was I experiencing? Dr Andy Kilov: You are experiencing those first few signs of a stroke, and I'm not sure if you are aware that there's an acronym called Fast Face, arm, speech, and Time. And these are the signs that help us recognize they at least the early signs that can be used to recognize that a stroke is occurring. And as we know I think that there was a slogan used this year in a stroke aay that Time is brain. And so being able to recognize those signs and get to our hospital as soon as you can, when those signs occur, help the teams in the hospital system work with intervention pathways and ensure that they're able to save brain with time on their hands and. Look at what intervention pathways are appropriate once they've done imaging and, and worked out what's happening. So you were experiencing that droopy face, that that slurred speech, that's the weakness in your muscles and that difficulty coming up with words is linked to. An aphasia, which means that you are having some form of language change and a difficulty accessing words and retrieving them and using them in a meaningful way. And I think that aphasia is a term that we probably need to explore a little bit more. Later on in this interview, but at least in the beginning, that's what you're experiencing. That drooling was related to a weakness in the muscles, a change in the swallow mechanism. That slurred speech is that dysarthria, that weakness in the muscles, that difficulty coordinating movements and that aphasia, which is, as I said, that difficulty accessing words and being able to use that in a meaningful way whilst also being confused and experiencing that. Acute moment of your stroke. Piers Grove: Yeah. Look, these terms have been absolutely Problematic for me partially because there were new terms that I didn't have in my language before the stroke. So we are going to tackle those terms as much for my own benefit. As for the listeners, when I got to the hospital, it was a pretty shocking experience for me. In that I went into an emergency for the first time on a stretcher at the back of an ambulance. I was put into a crash bay which is, I understand the highest place for emergency. Well, you know, I was surrounded by, Car crash victims. And I, I was attended to by a doctor that all came to a sudden stop when I tested positive for covid. I had had covid the week before and I'd taken the, the, the 10 days off work for it and had tested negative with the rats. So I'd been back at work. But I was tested positive in the hospital, and that meant I got shifted from the crash area into the Covid ward in emergency, which was a deeply unpleasant place where doctors did not visit because they had to, they had to put on their gear. So you were only really seen after by nurses. I had been treated by the emergency doctor who had obviously treated the stroke, the blockage in my brain effectively. And it did give me back a greater level of cognition. I was more, I was able to read text messages on my phone. I was able to talk over. The phone, I still had very little idea of time. And it's, it's a terrifying time. You sitting there in a hospital in isolation. And in my case, I was there for 14 hours before they got me into the stroke unit. And I could not name anything. Everyone got the nickname Doctor for the first week. And my fiance was wife and the kids were kids. But I was aware of it and I was aware that I was right on the precipice of. Serious disability. One that would project pro prevent me from working again and would probably see me in a nursing home for the rest of my life. Staring out the window at the ducks and being visited by well-meaning people on a schedule. And yet I thought that the stroke had been. Healed that the block was gone, that the blood wouldn't be flowing back into that part of my brain and would start working. But it didn't what was going on for me at that stage that, I guess less the da the brain dysfunctional, even though it had been cleared up. Dr Andy Kilov: It's a very confronting space to be in. And I think that, I think you also experienced your stroke at a really difficult time for our health landscape in that our usual processes in hospitals and in the community were operating in, like you say, in isolated streams because of your positive covid result. So when you were sitting having that realization, You were aware of what was going on, and I think, again, this is another misconception in that people who have strokes then have impaired cognition. They don't always have impaired cognition. And sometimes even though the stroke is treated, there are areas that are affected either temporarily or permanently by the blockage or the loss of blood flow. To certain parts of the brain. In your case, it's almost like the lights went off and had to reestablish new ways of turning on and reconnecting with parts of functioning areas of your brain. When you say that you were calling people by general terms in your vocab system, you are able to recognize. People's functions like, okay, I can get the word doctor out, and this term seems appropriate for anyone who's helping me in the hospital setting. You weren't able to take it that step further into the subcategory, so you weren't able to necessarily retrieve nurse versus doctor. And sometimes this is called a semantic para plasia. When you default to a more generic term, or you use one term for many things because there's similarities in the words function. When you knew that your kids were your kids, but again, your word retrieval system wasn't allowing you to go to that space in your system that had their names for you to hook onto and use. And the same with your fiance in the beginning few days of a stroke. Even when you've been treated, it can be like a blank canvas in that you've got to reacquaint yourself with. Words that carry meaning and specific weight in your speech output. And the brain's really tired after a stroke, so sometimes it's not that you can't do it, but it's just that cognitive load is too much. And so your brain's defaults to these other ways of getting your message across, even when you can't use the exact pathway that carries the specific meaning.